37 posts from July 2010

July 29, 2010

I'm in a taxi that's barreling down the freeway to KLIA, and will get to the airport really early and have lots of time to explore and take pictures, or die a fiery death. Could go either way. (How fast is 140 km/h? Must remember to check if I survive.)

On my last night in Malaysia, my hosts and a couple other conference speakers-- we were from Venezuela, Turkey, South Korea, and the U.S.; we could have been the setup to a joke involving a bar, a one-legged parrot, and a hilarious misunderstanding over the word for "hand lotion"-- drove up to Kuala Lumpur to have dinner at the Patronas Twin Towers.

KL, as its called, has plenty of interesting architecture and monuments, but they're all literally dwarfed by Patronas. It's one of the tallest buildings in Asia, and views of it command premium prices in the condos nearby (and a few have plummeted in value after a bigger project closer to the Towers has blocked their view). I saw pictures of it when it first opened, and thought it looked interesting but overdesigned and a little gimmicky-- Cesar Pelli's attempt to create a South Asian vernacular postmodernism. It's certainly distinctly Asian, but it's anything but a gimmick. It's masterful.

From a distance, its lit in a way that gives it complete dominance over the skyline. Other buildings aren't dark by any means, but they can't come close to Petronas.

It's bright, certainly, but that's not what draws you in: the lighting is varied and complicated, a mix of lights that illuminate the tower, accentuate certain details, and enhance the shadows.

We parked in the mall beside the tower, and headed to a park with a huge fountain (the synchronized water show kind, invented by a Stanford product design grad) and a good view of the tower.

Fortunately, for once i was not the only person in my group with a camera and a tendency to take vast numbers of pictures.

Up close, the towers look like something on Pandora: they don't so much reflect the light as glow, almost as if they were phosphorescent.

Looking at them, I was reminded of jellyfish or a bright ship's wake. At the same time, it's not just a glow: you can still see an amazing amount of detail, thanks to the judicious way the lights are set, and the presence of shadows in just the right places.

Combining elements of makeover fantasies, petal-strewn dating programs, Japanese game shows, magazine columns of the snag-a-man Cosmo sort, and primitive folklore, Plain Jane (the CW, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET) brushes the pleasure receptors with an odd texture of fluff....

[Hostess Jane] Roe advertises herself as a fashion journalist and stylist "hailing from London but now based in L.A.," and she plays her role with perfection. She is faintly alien, plausibly posh, strategically tacky, and Britishly skinny, her eyelashes thicker than her forearms.... Plain Jane, Roe says, will be "transformed into a new woman with the style and confidence to surprise the man of her dreams on a romantic date." The real star of the show is that concept—a mission statement so clear and concise that you can practically feel the mineral water fizzing in the pitch meeting.

"In 2007, Paul Ingram and Michael Morris conducted a study of business executives at Columbia University. The executives were invited to a cocktail mixer, where they were encouraged to network with new people. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of executives at the event said their primary goal was to meet “as many different as people as possible” and “expand their social network”. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. By surreptitiously monitoring the participants with electronic devices, Ingram and Morris were able to track every conversation. What they found was that people tended to interact with the people who were most like them.... [In fact] the only successful networker at the event was the bartender."

July 26, 2010

I made it to Singapore in one piece, with all my stuff-- I love Singapore Airlines, I truly do-- and am now in my dad's apartment. After 20 hours flying, I cannot begin to describe the psychic dislocation that comes from being in a gated community called the Caribbean that is popular with expat Australians and Americans.

On the other hand, I hear that the Olympic-sized pool and weight rooms are world class, and the steam bath is not to be missed. So I plan to stretch and lift and cardio all the food that the flight attendants kept trying to serve me. I said no to a lot, but the problem is, when you're being offered things like tuna sashimi, chilean sea bass, and lamb satay, it's easy to rationalize having just one. And maybe just another one.

As I mentioned, I got a business class ticket for this trip. Singapore Air's economy service is pretty notoriously good, and the business class is outrageous. This is my seat (and yes, I did have to use Photo Stitch to capture the whole thing):

However, much as I appreciate the luxury, I find myself a bit disquieted. The crew seems much-better mannered, and more knowledgeable about etiquette, than me. Whenever they serve something, they rearrange my tray, put things back in their place, and generally return everything to the Approved Ground State.

As a result, I approach every interaction with them with a little anxiety. Will I live up to the steward's expectations? Will I put the dinner roll on the wrong plate?

July 25, 2010

"The best leaders: Are friends with their subordinates but make decisions on their own; Compete with their own direct reports and make sure they are better than others; Speak honestly, but take into account others' status; Use indirect language and metaphors rather than get straight to the point; Avoid taking risks. American readers are probably scratching their heads: what kind of a leadership profile is this? How can a leader ignore his direct reports when making key decisions? What happens to credibility when you're constantly massaging the message? The brief profile above came from a survey of Chinese managers as part of the research program called the GLOBE project. Of course, there are also parts of the Chinese ideal leadership profile that are similar to the American profile, but it's usually the differences that get managers in trouble.:

I'm in the Singapore Air lounge at SFO, on my way to Singapore and Malaysia. I'm spending a day with my dad and stepmother in Singapore (after 40 years as a professor in the US, Pop decided it was time for a new career challenge, and so took a gig in Asia), then on to Malaysia, where I'll speak at a futures conference. I wrote an article [pdf] about the futures scene in Malaysia a year ago (it's one of the most forward-looking countries in the world), and some of what I talked about is starting to brew. It'll be interesting to see it first-hand.

This is an insane trip. My wife had to get up at 4:30 for the San Francisco Marathon, and the kids and I ran the 5K this morning, so we all bundled into the car before dawn, and fought out way to the Embarcadero. Miraculously I found street parking.

The kids enjoyed the 5k, though I think for them it's not the running that they'll remember but the number and variety of snacks, samples, juices, and smoothies that they were able to try at the end. When you're 8 pain is temporary, but the memory of getting a Jamba Juice from a guy in a banana suit is forever.

Then it was back in the minivan, across town to Golden Gate Park, and to the finish line for the half marathon. We got there a minute after she finished, got some food, then headed back to the car and to SFO. Dropped me off, into the loving embrace of Singapore Air.

There are times when you're made very aware of just how much your family makes your life possible. Exactly two months ago I was in London and Cambridge; now I'm headed to the other side of the world. Most spouses who have to deal with such schedules or who find themselves married to travel addicts take to drink. Next time, she comes with me. The kids have also adjusted well to having a parent away (heaven knows they've had plenty of experience), but I think it's time to take it to the next level. They can find us on Facebook if they need instructions about how to use the stove.

I'll be in Malaysia until Friday, then I fly back here, and the next day turn around and head for another gig in the Rockies. When it rains it pours.

Naturally I've got the mobile version of my life set up. And now that I have a 500 gb hard drive, I can carry pretty much my entire movie collection with me. Not like I need the distraction. It's just nice to have. I think many travelers have one indulgence of this sort: my dad carries five times as many ties as he could possibly need, other people carry books, yet others pack extra clothes.

In many ways I love Singapore Air, but the one complaint I have about them is the absence of common space: on SAS or United you can get up and stand, which is essential for my sanity; Singapore doesn't really have any public space, and they're happiest if you're just confined to your seat the whole 20 hours. This time, my patrons have put me in business class, which means I essentially have my own cabin. My hope is I can do some calisthenics in it without disturbing other passengers. Seriously.

Of course, as always, the main attraction for this kind of trip is the chance to get some serious thinkingandwriting done. I need to work more on my talk, but I'm also going to try to finish "Paper Spaces 2: Revenge of the Fallen" before I return home. I've really got all the material I need to get it done, and I can only re-watch Mission Impossible 3 so many times in one 24-hour period.

[To the tune of Pat Metheny, "Holding Us," from the album A Map Of The World (a 3-star song, imo).]

Shirley Sherrod, the former rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia found that out the hard way when she was fired by the Obama administration for her delivery of a supposedly racist speech. The speech was creatively excerpted, political bloggers and cable news commentators blew up the story, it entered the Twitterverse, and boom, Sherrod was asked to resign from her position.

Unfortunately, no one seemed to have time to listen to the whole speech. Once they did, Sherrod was showered with apologies and found herself taking calls from the President.

This story is less about politics and more about pace. It provides a clear example of how our Facebook and Twitter behaviors are bleeding over into the rest of our lives.... When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.

July 22, 2010

"The old complex—the aerospace and shipbuilding corporations that emerged or thrived after World War II—was probably necessary, too. But, as students of that complex know, it has a downside—and the downside in this new intelligence-IT complex could be fatal.
Arkin put it this way in a phone conversation Thursday afternoon: Let's say Company A is selling some kind of IT gizmo for the National Reconnaissance Office, and let's say Company B is selling another kind of gizmo for the National Security Agency. Neither company has the slightest incentive to tell the other what its gizmo is. And it's quite possible that the NRO doesn't know what the NSA has—and vice-versa. The solution to the problem might be something that A and B could do together—but they will never join forces."

The rise of the professional futurist is important. Although humans are capable of thinking through the implications of our actions, we are still notoriously bad at acting in our own long-term best interests, let alone the long-term best interests of society at large. Evidence to this effect continues to mount in fields such as psychology and economics: We value immediate payoffs over larger future benefits; we don't account for the full scope of impact that our actions will have on the lives of others; and we can only think about the future by using the reference frames of the past and the present.

A "new Center for Global Development essay by Andrew Natsios, former USAID Administrator and current Georgetown Prof" argues that US aid programs "are suffering from a disfiguring imbalance. The compliance side of aid, which he calls the “counter-bureaucracy,” has grown grotesquely out of proportion to the programmatic, technical side, and threatens to undermine aid’s goals."

"Is it possible that history as old as 1500 AD or older also matters significantly for today’s national economic development? A small body of previous growth literature also considers very long run factors in economic development.... This paper explores these questions both empirically and theoretically. To this end, we assemble a new dataset on the history of technology over 2,500 years of history prior to the era of colonization and extensive European contacts.... We detect signs of technological differences between the predecessors to today’s modern nations as long ago as 1000 BC, and we find that these differences persisted and/or widened to 0 AD and to 1500 AD.... Our principal finding is that the 1500 AD measure is a statistically significant predictor of the pattern of per capita incomes and technology adoption across nations that we observe today."

On the jockeying for Helen Thomas' seat (or, cognitive regulatory capture distilled into fights over a seating chart). "That the White House press corps cares so desperately about their perches reveals their psychological frailty. All the jockeying for the still-warm seat speaks to the status anxiety of the applicants. It's not the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or the New York Times that are pleading for the top spot in the room. They seem to be OK with their second-row seats. It's the arriviste and insecure bosses who run Fox, Bloomberg, and NPR who strive against reason to move up a row or two in the cramped hell that is the briefing room. If only they could repurpose their narcissism toward producing better journalism."

"Unlike traditional dating sites where members spend hours on computers writing autobiographies and scrutinizing photographs, a raft of newfangled dating tools are striving to better bridge the gap between online and real-world romance. Some companies offer a combination of flirty calling cards and Web pages. Others operate dating applications that use the global positioning systems in cellphones to help local singles find one another. All of them contend they are superior to big online dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony.com because meeting people is faster, more organic and less formal. And participants are not limited to a database of members: the world is their dating pool."

"It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you."

IRL: In Real Life. It's used as shorthand all over the Internet, to distinguish what happens online from what happens offline. And it's a lie. If we still refer to the offline world as "real life," it's only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century.

Bob Sutton: "[O]rganizational psychologist Karl Weick" observed "that the people we consider wise have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along."

Because it provided the dominant framework for "development" of poor, postcolonial countries, modernization theory ranks among the most important constructs of twentieth—century social science. In Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America Nils Gilman offers the first intellectual history of a movement that has had far—reaching and often unintended consequences.

Climate change models aren't "predictive enough to be actionable because the exact nature of the events that will jar the planet in the near- and long-term future... remains both unknown and unknowable. This paper offers policymakers an alternative approach to thinking about climate change and its impacts. Instead of starting with climate change and working out toward impacts, we focus on systems that are already generally vulnerable first, and then consider what the geophysics of climate change may do to them. This approach has two benefits. First, it limits the number of logical steps necessary for thinking about the impacts of climate change, enabling more confident insights and conclusions. Second, it cuts across analytic stovepipes and gives regional specialists a framework for thinking about what climate change will mean for their particular areas, based on expertise they already have."

I'm listening to Pat Metheny Group's 2005 CD The Way Up while I work on Paper Spaces 2: Dead Man's Chest. What have I been doing these last five years that was more important than listen to this? It may be Metheny's best work ever, and that's saying a lot.

[To the tune of Pat Metheny Group, "Part One," from the album The Way Up (a 4-star song, imo).]

July 19, 2010

George Loewenstein argues against over-reliance on behavioral economics in public policy-- and especially using it to evade difficult decision-making. "Behavioral economics should complement, not substitute for, more substantive economic interventions. If traditional economics suggests that we should have a larger price difference between sugar-free and sugared drinks, behavioral economics could suggest whether consumers would respond better to a subsidy on unsweetened drinks or a tax on sugary drinks. But that’s the most it can do. For all of its insights, behavioral economics alone is not a viable alternative to the kinds of far-reaching policies we need to tackle our nation’s challenges."

July 18, 2010

On Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, and his interesting, complex relationship with U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. "Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace."

July 16, 2010

Profile of the 1970 World Game and esp. SIU's group, "a company of future oriented, inter-disciplinary technological explorers who are participating in the World Game, a unique experiment to develop a computer coordinated model of planet earth—complete with resources, history, human attitudes and social trends—that can be used to "play the world" and develop ways of running the future for the benefit of all mankind. The experiment is being conducted in more than 20 universities and colleges in the United States, Canada and Europe but its center is housed in the basement and first floor of a monotonous two-story brick building surrounded by a dusty, graveled parking lot, about six blocks off-campus from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois."

The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades... extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade.

"Welcome to myForesight -- Malaysia’s first national-level initiative dedicated to the study and application of Foresight. Besides prospecting technology for business. it provides a common platform for shared experiences, insights and expertise on futures studies -- both at the local and global levels. At this initial stage, myForesight will focus on awareness and the participation of Malaysian stakeholders on Foresight current programmes. myForesight is a joint initiative by various parties who have a dedicated stake in Malaysia’s future.Click on the tabs below for a synopsis of myForesight."

Ruth Evans takes an historical perspective on Andy Clark's natural-born cyborgs argument, and that "human cognition is not just embodied but embedded: not mind in body, but both mind and body enmeshed in a wider environment of ever-growing complexity that we create and exploit to make ourselves smarter."

From the abstract:

The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades (I borrow the term ‘mindware’ from Clark, 2001) extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade. What cultural history adds to our understanding of embedded cognition is not only a recognition of our cyborg past but a historicized understanding of human reality.

This reminds me some of the work of the cognitive anthropology crowd, which I find necessarily speculative but extremely ambitious and interesting.

July 15, 2010

To gain more insight into the extent to which foresters experience uncertainty in their work field, a content analysis has been carried out to reveal how foresters from the United States and (Germanic) Central Europe (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) experience uncertainty. The outcomes were compared with the experiences of uncertainty in a more short-term oriented sector, namely the agricultural sector (also in the United States and in Central Europe). Although the findings must be interpreted carefully, the research reveals that, in contrast to what was expected, foresters experience the future as the most certain time period. Decisionmakers in forestry, as in other business sectors, seem to ignore the uncertainty and pretend that the future is certain. This strategy implies considerable risk and, therefore, for forest management to be effective, there is no other way than actively confronting the futurity dilemma.

"The importance of strategic planning as an instrument to cope with the uncertain future has been long recognized, especially in forestry which is characterized by its relationship with the distant future. Surprisingly, the question to what extent the future is indeed considered in forestry decision-making has received only limited attention. It is therefore the objective of this paper to explore empirically foresters' relation with time (called time perspectives), and more specifically their future orientation, as a basic prerequisite for strategic planning in forestry."

Long range (or strategic) planning is an important tool for forest management to deal with the complex and unpredictable future. However, it is the ability to make meaningful predictions about the rapidly changing future that is questioned. What appears to be particularly neglected is the question of the length of time horizons and the limits (if any) to these horizons, despite being considered one of the most critical factors in strategic planning. As the future creation of values lies within individual responsibility, this research empirically explored the limits (if any) of individual foresters’ time horizons. To draw comparisons between countries with different traditions in forest management planning, data were collected through telephone surveys of forest managers in the state/national forest services of the Netherlands and Germany. In order to minimize other cultural differences, the research in Germany concentrated on the federal state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, which has consider

More of this, please: studies of how communities view the future. This studies foresters in Europe. "The study takes a different approach than previous research: it takes an actor-oriented perspective and focuses on the question of how foresters actually cope with the uncertain future in their actions. This requires not only a shift in the understanding of time from a physical entity to that of a social realm but – even more importantly – a shift from interpreting uncertainty from some form of independent variable to viewing uncertainty as a cognitive and psychological state – a social construct about the availability and “makeability” of the future."

The question "Who owns the future?" has become more urgent. At the same time, in the information society, there is an increasingly varied multitude of answers to this question. Hence, the key becomes asking well-targeted questions. If you ask who owns the future, a lot of answers crop up.... The moment you own the future, it has become the present. Eternally owned is only that which is lost."

Methods of foresight and future studies are no longer limited to business, government and other organizations. The study of personal futures is still in its infancy, but holds potential not only for you but also for your company. Learn how you can be your own futurist through personal research, and thereby achieve your preferred future.

The Performance Agency, Fiction Pimps, manifest ‘Cracks’ in everyday life – Sensory fictive parallel universes that aim at activating the aesthetic dimension of experience and reflection, to enrich any given situation and the persons involved in it. They fiction pimp and will Crack your World!
…
We are hybrids of performers, sirens, agents, poets, futurists, activists, visionaries, mystics and scientists.

This contribution deals with the problems in thinking and communicating about the future which are due to the variety and complexity of the types of futures, i.e. possible, potential, probable, desired, surprising, creatable future and the like. A set of resulting so called futures confusions is revealed, the goals confusion, the roles confusion and the methods confusion. The types of futures used in practice and discussed in the academic literature are presented comprehensively in order to identify the reasons for the difficulties leaders and managers experience when dealing with long term futures.

The struggle for the future is very much about communication. They who manage to set the agenda will also be those who dominate the decisions and behavior of many others. So we see more and more messages about the future that go hand in hand with media expertise. Even so, we have never been more shortsighted in our view of the future.

Foresight processes and activities are confronted with the task of making sense of the present, in particular by interpreting weak signals of change in the organizational environment. Although trends are considered to be important drivers of environmental discontinuities which may lead to strategic surprises, there is no operationalization from a strategic point of view. In this paper we are going to conceptualize trends as (socio-cultural) innovations. This leads to important implications. If the nature of innovation is taken seriously, then strategic trend diagnosis has to deal with two different aspects, invention and diffusion.

July 14, 2010

Scenarios are claimed to support strategic decision makers. They are especially effective in dealing with uncertainties. This paper addresses some drawbacks of the conventional scenario method, which is especially directed at handling these uncertainties, and indicates possible avenues for methodological adaptations.

Foresight processes and activities are confronted with the task of making sense of the present, in particular by interpreting weak signals of change in the organizational environment. Although trends are considered to be important drivers of environmental discontinuities which may lead to strategic surprises, there is no operationalization from a strategic point of view. In this paper we are going to conceptualize trends as (socio-cultural) innovations. This leads to important implications. If the nature of innovation is taken seriously, then strategic trend diagnosis has to deal with two different aspects, invention and diffusion.

July 13, 2010

In this paper we will study “weak signals” by concentrating on the journalistic texts of The New York Times before the stock market crashes of 1929, 1987 and 2000. The paper argues that, even if information and communication technology advanced dramatically from the 1920s to 2000, the flaws of business journalism in writing about stock markets have remained almost the same: their reporting is too enthusiastic (or positive) and uncritical, and therefore incapable of effectively detecting the weak signals of impending collapses on the Stock Exchange. Thus we might conclude that neither the increase in the speed of spreading the information nor the accessibility to such information necessarily leads to greater efficiency in using it. The New York Times itself stated repeatedly that the policy of the newspaper has always aimed at “not making financial crises worse”. Thus the pages of the newspaper contain more positive than negative articles on stock exchanges.

…are ideas, trends, technologies or behaviour changes that are as yet unrecognised by mainstream society. They might have a big impact or they might disappear. We monitor them to help our partners challenge their assumptions about the future, navigate risk and seize new opportunities.

Scanning for Emerging Science & Technology Issues aims to develop a mechanism for the early identification of newly emerging issues of importance to the European research infrastructure. By collecting weak signals and developing anticipatory intelligence, SESTI will provide the means for proactively addressing these challenges at European and national level.

The project builds on and adds value to existing national structures and competences in foresight and horizon scanning to create synergies and exploit complementarities. SESTI aims to provide a transnational “foundation” to horizon scanning to enable efficient use of anticipatory intelligence in both EU and national policy.

The 2-day kick-off conference of the European Foresight Platform has been held on June 14 and 15, 2010 at the Vienna French Cultural Institute in Austria. With over 80 attendees and about 20 presenters the event has been a huge success by bringing together international professional foresight communities, representatives from the European Commission and policy as well as the EFP consortium and the interested general public.

A variety of different foresight and forward-looking projects and institutions have been presented at the conference. It has been a tour through all different perspectives of future-related activities which included quantitative forecasting and modeling, scenario development, technology forecasts and roadmaps, societal and cultural oriented future studies, participatory elements in foresight, weak signal and wild card research, foresight databases and ideas about new methods like using gaming and social networks for foresight and forward looking activities.

"It seems an odd thing to me that though we have thousands and thousands of professors and hundreds of thousands of students of history working upon the records of the past, there is not a single person anywhere who makes a whole-time job of estimating the future consequences of new inventions and new devices. There is not a single Professor of Foresight in the world. But why shouldn’t there be? All these new things, these new inventions and new powers, come crowding along; every one is fraught with consequences, and yet it is only after something has hit us hard that we set about dealing with it."

Weak signals can range from small changes in behaviour and technology, to signs that a significant shift in a system might be imminent [see box ‘Weak signals, strong undercurrents’ below]. Often it can just involve a hunch that something different is underway, rather than a clear indication of predictable change. An individual signal might make little sense at the time; it might require a number of other similar signals, or a creative leap to realise just what it could be pointing to. It can be infuriatingly abstract. But you have to make a note just in case…

iKNOW has developed conceptual and methodological frameworks to identify, classify, cluster and analyse wild cards and weak signals and assess their implications for, and potential impacts on, Europe and the world. To do so, the iKNOW project has developed well-defined scanning strategies, such as the inward-looking top-down (ILTD), which is carried out by the iKNOW Consortium and involves the scanning of over 2,000 EU-funded research projects; and the outward-looking bottom-up (OLBU), which required the creation of the iKNOW Community (including policy-makers, decision-makers, researchers and foresight practitioners) to scan a wide range of knowledge sources (e.g. journal articles, blogs, news, etc.).

As a result, iKNOW puts forward a novel ‘horizon scanning 2.0’ approach which, on the one hand, promotes participatory and bottom-up scanning supported by web 2.0 technologies, and, on the other hand, improves information collection, filtering, communication and exploitation.

impose a 400% increase in its online access fee for UC, a hike the university says would come to more than $1 million a year. The result is talk of a systemwide boycott of Nature publications unless the firm becomes more accommodating.

But the dispute underscores a more far-reaching debate in academia: Whether the old business model of scientific publishing, in which researchers turn their work over to commercial entities for free, then pay through the nose to access it in print or online, hasn't reached the point of ultimate absurdity.

[To the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Green River," from the album Green River (a 2-star song, imo).]

July 12, 2010

Inside the WI-WE Bank, so far we have mapped 282 Wild Cards, 175 Weak Signals (total of 457 WI-WE) and 64 active members. You will be able to view Wild Cards (WI) and Weak Signals (WE), create your own Wild Cards and/or Weak Signals, answer to Wild Cards and Weak Signals Deplhi. You can also contribute to other member's Wi-We as they can contribute to yours.

"[N]anotechnology policy is not determined by government nor by industry or science, it evolves in a contingent – but nevertheless structured – process of governance where multiple actors interact in a dynamic setting. Within this processes, signals indicating the possibility of future change – “weak signals” – attracted increasing attention. Regarding weak signals in a positivistic tradition as given entities that indicate future change, one could say that the former weak signals were (‘correctly’) identified by scientists, industry, policy-makers and so NST became an emerging issue in science and innovation policy. Regarding weak signals in a post-positivistic way (and emphasizing that governance studies need to analyze how fields of emerging technologies are constructed through discourse), weak signals can be understood as “boundary objects” that link different social worlds, such as science, politics, industry, NGOs and media."

July 11, 2010

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine decided she wanted to sell her MacBook Pro. I've been looking to upgrade the kids' computer, so I bought it from her, and figured I would give the kids my 13" Powerbook.

They were at camp, so I was able to do all this without their knowing, and was also able to swap out the hard drives. Almost a year ago, I upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook, and since it's a 500 mb drive with my entire life on it, I didn't want to just leave it for the kids.

I got online and went looking for instructions for how to install a new drive in a Macbook Pro. Putting a new drive in the old machine was VERY easy; this time it was a little more difficult, but so long as you're patient and careful, even a relative neophyte like me can handle it.

However, so long as you're patient, follow the instructions, stay mindful and don't panic, you really should be fine. Modern electronics are meant to be modular, to be put together by people who aren't very highly educated (computer assembly stopped being the province of Ph.D.s a couple generations ago), and to be hard to mess up. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to do it.

The new machine is terrific: the extra 2" of screen make a significant difference, and I like the backlit keyboard. I may to upgrade the RAM before too long, but that's more because I can, rather than because the machine needs it.

[To the tune of Michael Nyman Band, "Fish Beach (from Drowning By Numbers)," from the album The Essential Michael Nyman Band (a 3-star song, imo).]

Friday Heather and I drove from Menlo Park to Mendocino. We had to pick up the kids from Camp Winnarainbow on Saturday, and decided not to do the usual barrel-up-101-that-morning thing. After two weeks of freedom, we were enjoying being adults a little too much. So instead of going inland, we took Highway 1, which runs along the northern coast. I hadn't been on Hwy 1 since I was a kid-- my dad quite liked driving roads like that when I was young and he had a Mustang-- and I'd heard good things about it.

Highway 1 along is beautiful, though a lot of it is terrain you'd look at, not walk around. The cliffs can be pretty sheer, and the tide looks treacherous. (I wonder how close you can get to the rocks on an ocean kayak.) It was pretty foggy on Friday, but that didn't make the drive less interesting: the fog was often driven across the road by pretty high winds, so that only added to the drama of the landscape.

We stopped at Fort Ross, a Russian fort built in the early 19th century to supply the Russian settlement in Alaska.

It wasn't much of a success, and eventually was sold to Sutter in 1841 (who given the extent of his involvement in colonial California real estate really should have died incredibly wealthy). As the state Web site says,

Fort Ross was the southernmost settlement in the Russian colonization of the North American continent, and was established as an agricultural base to supply Alaska. It was the site of California's first windmills and shipbuilding, and Russian scientists were among the first to record California’s cultural and natural history. Fort Ross was a successfully functioning multi-cultural settlement for some thirty years. Settlers included Russians, Native Alaskans and Californians, and Creoles (individuals of mixed Russian and native ancestry.)

The fort is a mix of original and reconstructed buildings, and if you go for that sort of thing, is well worth the visit. The park nearby is also excellent: the coast is rugged, and there are sea lions on some of the rocks.

Mendocino is a tiny town, with a disproportionate number of art galleries, boutiques selling earth-toned natural fiber clothes meant to be worn by willowy middle-aged women possessing tasteful collections of silver Navajo jewelry, and restaurants that range from the outrageously expensive to the strictly organic, with nothing in between. Heather thought it would make a fine place to spend a weekend, but after that it might get a little dull. After she shared this with a friend who lived there, he said, "Yeah, the first three days are fine, and then there are the next two and half years."

With our local dining choices reduced to "if you have to ask you can't afford it" foie gras or gluten-free, we chose the latter. After a little wandering around, we found Frankie's, an excellent pizza and ice cream place. It was extremely friendly, the sort of place where the kids are playing under the tables while parents sing a long with the folk songs.

It made an interesting ice cream, though I don't think mint chocolate chip has to worry about competition.

The next morning we had breakfast at Thanksgiving Coffee Co., another organic local place. From what I could tell of the scene that morning, and the vast number of flyers on the cafe wall, it seemed to me that for all its tourist orientation, the town does also have a nice degree of local culture and community.

July 06, 2010

Pam is one of scores of simulations, drills and exercises that take place every year at all levels of government and in the private sector with the intention of testing and preparing everyone from first responders to senior-level decision-makers for crises. Critics say real-life events often show the practices don't adequately prepare these critical players.... Hopmeier and others say many preparedness exercises are not nearly as valuable as advertised, or as they could be. Simply holding them is not sufficient; the exercises must be evaluated to ensure they are testing the system enough to expose vulnerabilities and problems that must then be repaired.

"Exercises are not all created equal," says Michael Wermuth, director of homeland security programs at the nonprofit RAND Corp. "There are a lot of different kinds of exercises, a lot of different methodologies used to conduct exercises."

Since 2001, state and local health departments in the United States (US) have accelerated efforts to prepare for high-impact public health emergencies. One component of these activities has been the development and conduct of exercise programs to assess capabilities, train staff and build relationships. This paper summarizes lessons learned from tabletop exercises about public health emergency preparedness and about the process of developing, conducting, and evaluating them.

Legal preparedness is a critical component of comprehensive public health preparedness for public health emergencies. The scope of this study was to assess the usefulness of combining didactic sessions with a tabletop exercise as educational tools in legal preparedness, to assess the impact of the exercise on the participants’ level of confidence about the legal preparedness of a public health system, and to identify legal issue areas in need of further improvement.

All phases of the disaster response must be addressed in a disaster plan. Functional job descriptions and responsibilities of all agencies and organizations involved should be delineated clearly. More importantly, these plans should be exercised and rehearsed. The ideal exercise includes participation by all parties involved. Since these exercises, by their very nature, disrupt normal operations and are costly in personnel and material utilization, disaster agencies frequently conduct a proxy exercise on the "tabletop." This is a simulation of an emergency situation for training and testing plans and procedures that does not involve movement of response resources. Tabletop exercises are good training tools because they allow people in leadership positions to work through major problems without the cost of running vehicles, using staff and volunteer time, or using supplies. They can quickly highlight areas of weakness where additional support may be needed.

Strategic negotiations in digital tabletop displays have not been well understood. There is little reported in the literature on how users strategize when group priorities and individual priorities conflict and need to be balanced for a successful collaboration. We conducted an observational study on three digital tabletop systems and a real-world setup to investigate similarities and differences in real-world and digital tabletop strategic collaborations. Our results show that in the real world, strategic negotiation involves three phases: identifying the right timing, using epistemic actions to consider a task plan and evaluating the value of the negotiation. We repeated the real-world experiments with different digital tabletops and found several differences in the way users initiate and perform strategic negotiations.

There is a dire need to have complementary form of disaster training which is cost effective, relatively easy to conduct, comprehensive, effective and acceptable. This will complement field drills training. A classroom-based training and simulation module was built by combining multiple tools: Powerpoint lectures, simulations utilising the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) schematic module into ‘floortop’ model and video show of previous disaster drill.

Tabletop exercises are often used for learning purposes in the area of crisis management, yet their potential for this is far from clear. The study examines the learning outcomes achieved by a group of persons taking part in tabletop exercises in which they assess the crisis management capabilities of the organisation to which they belong and suggest possible improvements. Interviews with the participants provide evidence of positive learning effects. Although the effects are in line with generally accepted normative principles of crisis management, the degree of understanding that the participants gain about it appears to vary considerably. The underlying reasons for this are discussed.

Effective Department of Defense (DoD) response to pandemic influenza requires robust and well-exercised plans at the installation level. This article describes proceedings and key findings from a half-day “train-the-trainer” pandemic influenza tabletop exercise for Tri-Service installation public health emergency officers (PHEOs) at the August 2008 Force Health Protection conference. Exercise participants were expected to facilitate the execution of a pandemic influenza exercise at their respective installations within 6 months of attendance. On a 6-month follow-up survey (N = 50), 68% indicated their installations had since created a new pandemic influenza plan or revised an existing one, whereas 44% indicated that their installation had since conducted a pandemic influenza exercise.

Training exercises are now frequently used in health disaster and emergency medicine to train first responders,1 including the use of tabletop exercises.2–4 Nevertheless, these kinds of drills are not well described in occupational and industrial safety and health literature. They represent an interesting alternative to simulated disaster plans, which require considerable human and technical resources disrupt a company's daily business. Our purpose was to develop a special tabletop exercise training program for health and safety professionals such as occupational physicians and hygienists.

HSPH-CPHP supplies the content expertise relevant to simulating a public health emergency; develops the exercise scenario, Master Scenario Events List (MSEL), and supporting documentation; creates the evaluation plan and instruments; and provides trained personnel to facilitate exercise play and evaluate collective performance.
Since 2005, we have conducted 21 exercises and have direct access to 14 after-action reports (AARs) produced. For this study, we conducted a content analysis of the AARs written following 14 exercises conducted as part of the HSPH-CPHP exercise program, to identify recurrent themes related to the systems challenges faced by the responders during the simulated emergencies. This article describes the most common challenges identified during our exercises, and illustrates how exercises can act as an innovative way for academic partners to collaborate with public health practitioners to improve preparedness.

The threat of pandemic disaster has motivated many collaborative exercises for the purpose of preparation and evaluation. The nature of these exercises depends upon the status of pre-existing expectations for system behavior and the aims of the exercise stakeholders. The contents of this article argue that these exercises may be developed using the same approach as simulation modeling to advantage. Four levels of maturity are outlined as a guide to understanding reasonable expectations for such activity.

July 05, 2010

"Familiar faces from the federal government will be tested Tuesday, Feb. 16, to see how well Washington, D.C., would handle a cyber-crisis. Pass or fail, their performance will be seen by spectators -- and then broadcast on CNN for the world to see. The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a nonprofit that develops multiparty solutions in public policy, will host Cyber Shockwave, a simulated cyber-attack on the United States, during an exercise at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C."

Emergency exercises are worth the effort. Exercises identify areas that are proficient and those that need improvement. Lessons learned from exercises can be used to revise operational plans and provide a basis for training to improve proficiency in executing those plans. This course is designed to introduce you to the fundamentals of exercise design and to prepare you to design and conduct a small functional exercise for your organization. It addresses: The value of conducting exercises. The components of a comprehensive exercise program. The exercise development process ¾ development tasks, organization of the design team, exercise documentation, and the steps in designing an exercise.

But suppose integration doesn't change the culture of underperformance? What if integration inadvertently created that culture in the first place? This is the startling hypothesis of Stuart Buck's Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Buck argues that the culture of academic underachievement among black students was unknown before the late 1960s. It was desegregation that destroyed thriving black schools where black faculty were role models and nurtured excellence among black students. In the most compelling chapter of Acting White, Buck describes that process and the anguished reactions of the black students, teachers, and communities that had come to depend on the rich educational and social resource in their midst.

Thus, understanding how and why we experience regret and how regret influences choices and behaviors are important research questions. Previous research on regret has, however, to a large extent relied on younger participants and to date little is known about how and if the experience and anticipation of regret changes over the adult life-span.... This project uses both experimental and field studies to address how regret and the behavioral consequences of regret change with aging.

The Decision, Risk and Management Sciences program supports scientific research directed at increasing the understanding and effectiveness of decision making by individuals, groups, organizations, and society. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, doctoral dissertation research, and workshops are funded in the areas of judgment and decision making; decision analysis and decision aids; risk analysis, perception, and communication; societal and public policy decision making; management science and organizational design.

Scenario Discovery is a valuable approach to participatory, computer-assisted scenario development. It is useful for many hard, deeply uncertain policy problems such as climate change and energy planning. This project aims to advance scenario discovery methodology by applying novel algorithms that can provide significant new capabilities and then evaluating how decision makers respond to the results. It, thus, will simultaneously improve both the technical capacity of the modeling and the ability for decision makers to work effectively with the models.

Decision makers in fields as diverse as business, industry, law enforcement, and military/political intelligence rely on expert forecasts to help make important decisions. The purpose of these forecasts is to communicate information about a target situation in a format that is useful for decision makers. Unfortunately, many expert forecasts are probabilistic in nature and rife with analytic uncertainty.... Surprisingly, there has been relatively little research focused on how best to communicate these forecasts to decision makers. One issue of particular concern is how experts should represent analytic uncertainty and how uncertainty information is understood in the context of supporting narrative information.... This research implements nine experiments that examine the best ways of presenting analytic uncertainty, to assess the reasoning strategies used by decision makers, and to understand how individual differences in numeracy and cognitive style affect the use of expert forecasts.

July 04, 2010

He points out that Grindr is a response to online dating, which causes as many problems as it solves. "With missed connections and back and forth, and: 'Oh actually, this week I'm in New York, and you're in LA…' Online dating is frustrating! It is a lot of work!" Grindr, on the other hand, is immediate. There is no messing about, no toing and froing, no building up your hopes via weeks of emails only to discover on your first physical date that you just don't fancy whoever in the flesh. You see someone's picture on Grindr, you meet immediately, you establish whether or not you're attracted to each other: "Grindr reintroduces the aspect of chemistry. And – it's real. It is not a Second Life. It is not a virtual world. It's a tool. It enables real life, it doesn't replace it."

July 03, 2010

I have a bunch of books-- probably a couple hundred-- from my professional/scholarly collection that I want to give away. Most are history (with an emphasis on European and British history), history of science (largely modern, but a respectable smattering of early modern), STS, and contemporary technology and business. Many are duplicates (how did I get three copies of Rheingold's Virtual Communities and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities); others are books I've carried around for years and realize I will never read again (holla, Renissance Self-Fashioning!); and various others no longer match my current or likely future interests (Bernal's 3-volume history and Daniel Lindberg's Rise of Western Science are both great, but I'm not likely to teach intro history of science again).

I would prefer they go to someone in the field-- ideally a history or STS grad student or postdoc-- rather than just be donated to my local library's book sale; I don't want to go through the trouble of putting them up on eBay. Is there an academic equivalent to Freecycle that I can use to connect with some worthy soul (who will agree to pay shipping)?

[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Contrapunctus III (Fuga A 4 Voci)," from the album The Art of Fugue Vol. 1 (a 2-star song, imo).]

July 01, 2010

"[W]hile "modern" management is one of humankind's most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age.... Current management practices emphasize control, discipline and efficiency above all else — and that's a problem. To thrive in the 21st century, organizations must be adaptable, innovative, inspiring and socially accountable. That will require a genuine revolution in management principles and practices."

"Hasn't the Guggenheim heard that the world has changed? At a time of waning American empire and feeble global capitalism, the New York museum is flying a solitary flag of expansion. Its franchises around the world, from Berlin to – coming soon – Abu Dhabi, have earned it an image as the Starbucks of museums. Now yet another is to be created, in a nature reserve in northern Spain, and you may well ask: has the Guggenheim stretched its collections and curatorial imagination too thin?... A Guggenheim in every country would mean the triumph of this museum's intelligent view of modern art, and I would not be burying any flags."

Former Michigan Speaker of the House Republican Craig DeRoche was arrested Sunday morning after friends and family called police because DeRoche was drunk and carrying around a gun, the Detroit Free Press reports. This happened because DeRoche’s wife was out of town, and when that happens, you have a license to get drunk and ride bikes with your three children and then break into your own house, get a loaded .40 cal out of your safe, and wave it around in front of your children so they finally respect you.

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.